it’s been barely a year since Nokia CEO Stephe Elop switched to Windows Phone 7 Platform and we have already seen some decent WP7 devices from Nokia.Arguably the partnership isnt performing as great as nokia & Microsoft expected it to be.I remember Stephen Elop talking about how lucrative “swinging nokia’s 30% marketshare to Windows Phone ” is to Microsoft. But apparently WP7 Barely managed to acquire only about 2% marketshare of key markets like Europe.And that includes all the manufacturers combined including samsung and HTC , not only Nokia.
Now India is quite different story from Europe & US market. Buyers here generally care less about the OS their phone is running (although this awareness increasing rapidly). But more importantly Nokia have HUGE following and brand loyalty in india. You can put a nokia sticker and sell crap like N97 in truckloads. So there’s a fair chance that WP7 might be successful in India , especially if nokia manages to bring low priced Apollo phones soon enough.
Now as i have said a few times on twitter, i believe, as a OS, windows phone is unsuitable for indian market. Indian market and consumers are very different from US for whom the WP7 is designed for . So the “features” of WP7 may translate as restrictions to large number indian consumers. Why do I think so ? Lets see
Too much dependency on Internet / Data Network :
Windows Phone OS is designed ground up as a Modern Smartphone OS. It expects users to be always connected to internet. Microsoft introduced improved Live Tiles with mango update that dynamically shows and changes relevant information of the apps its.connected to. these are very useful and the smooth, tasteful transitions & animations makes these a pleasure to eye.most of these information is continuously fetched over internet. Now india is a country with low internet penetration. a large percentage of smartphone owners dont even opt for a data pack. Without internet & the ability to updated info , the live tiles are as good as giant oversized app icons. imagine those live tiles with static info. yes, that means they will look & work as blunt as still images of WP7 interface suggest. Suddenly the most beautiful UI on mobile isnt as attractive anymore for a large population right ?
Limited Bluetooth Support :
Bluetooth is very ubiquitous. Bluetooth Sharing is extremely common in india. From pictures , to ringtone to videos to songs ,people share everything in Bluetooth. As @clintonjeff said “the concept of syncing doesnt exists in india, everything is Bluetooth’d over”.Forget about copyrights . its something that we so naturally expect from any phone. so much so that people gets disappointed when $35 Nokia X1-01 doesn’t have Bluetooth despite having decent music player! now imagine same kind of disappointment from $600 lumia. you instantly get some very angry nokia customer.
Also, not only file sharing. bluetooth is quite useful for connecting to internet also via Bluetooth DUN profile that i personally use a lot. unless nokia fix this soon, it is going to make some very disappointed customer.
Lack of Browser Options :
WP7 comes with mobile Internet Explorer , which to be honest isnt nearly as bad as its desktop counterpart . various benchmark test suggests that compared to stock android browser,they are not too bad actually. So what i am complaining about ? well rendering speed is not something that i give a damn about. We barely get 64-120 kpbs speed on most EDGE network. so data inflow isnt going to bottleneck browser anyway. But because the speed is so low many people here uses browser like opera mini. opera mini pre-render WebPages and compresses it upto 90% before sending it to mobile so for most sites it makes a huge difference. so people here loves opera mini. the numbers doesnt lie, india is now second largest country for opera mini usage. we indian NEED browser that need data compression. Even Nokia knows these , thats why they made their own opera mini alternative and bundle it with basic S40 phone .
But windows phone 7 , as typical iPhone fashion doesnt allow third party browsers . No third party browser means no opera mini. that makes Windows Phone practically for vast numbers of indian mobile phone users depending on EDGE.
Lack of expandable storage card support :
This is something that nokia spoiled us. i just cant imaging spending $100 (that;s Rs5500 in indian curency ) for a 16 GB bump in storage because i’m used to spending Rs 1000 bucks and buy a 16GB microSD instead. when an average user learn that his lumia isnt going to support microSD he will instantly feel ripped-off . the idea of “expandable memory” is so ubiquitous that even roadside stalls sells them. Now microsoft may argue that with skydrive providing 25GB space and cloud becoming increasingly important, we dont really need to store that much data on phone. It may be true in places where operator are fighting over who have best 4G speed. But in a country where data cap for 3G data starts from 100mb a month (yeah you read it right , one hundred megabytes) & EDGE data is capped at 60 kbps, the concept of cloud doesnt really exists. hopefully nokia/microsoft is working in it it’ll be solved with apollo update.
iTunes sucks , so does Zune :
From my first Nokia smartphone i am used to popping my memory card in pc , copy / paste stuff i wanna put , reinsert card in phone and enjoy the media.And Ii recent years i didnt even bothered about converting videos because symbian and android both handled most of the popular codecs well. Now with WP it feels like 2005 all over again,when phones didn’t support standards well and we needed to convert each content in formats that phones liked. This is ridiculous, its 2012 already and we are thinking about native flac support. in android world we whine if our phone cant play 1080p video in some exotic format (even when we probably have a 480p display).ok forget, android, even two year old Nokia N8 played almost everything you through at it. This is the way we , nokia users do it microsoft , this is the way we we grew up. Stop copying apple . Just because apple can get away with crapware such as iTunes , doesnt mean microsoft can get away it zune too.
Remember this is not even a list of features that WP7 is lacking in. its just a subset of features that makes WP7 unsuitable for indian users. and i haven’t even started with numbers of apps or costs apps. or the fact that multitasking is sucks in WP. or that it doesnt support video calling.i was actually considering getting a cheap WP7 like lumia 710. But as i evaluated my usage and tried to mirror it in WP7 world i realised WP7 just doesnt cut it.This is microsoft product product, not nokia product. So no matter how bad my battery life my samsung android have, no matter how bad the audio quality is and no matter how cheap it feels , at the end of the day android gets the job done. and thats better than having a beautiful shiny piece of useless crap.
Filed under: mobile | 1 Comment
Tags: Nokia lumia, windows phone, windows phone 7, WP7, wp7 in india
lately i’ve been suggesting many people to use phone as modem insted of using usb modems .a 3G USB modems normally cost ~ Rs3500 where as nowdays you can get a 3G phone at ~ Rs 4200 or less if you choose other brand than nokia . for roughly 500 more you get a phone , a camera , a music player and all those things. and contrary to general belief USB modems are not faster than phone tethering. they both use same network and same airwaves same connection so speed is similar .
( some usb devices like photon+ or reliance netconnect uses CDMA-EVDO network which is roughly equivalant to CDMA’s 3G network , so they are obviouly faster, but are also much more expensive,so i am not comparing with them )
Ok so here are the steps -
- > Connect your bluetooth dongle , turn on in your PC , turn on bluetooth in your phone
- > If you are using IVT Bluesoleil bluetooth driver , search for devices , wait a few seconds , when your devices show up , double click on your device name. this will show the services your mobile is capable of through bluetooth.
- > In the services list you should see “bluetooth dial up networking “. if you dont see the service , refresh it . if you still dont see it , you’re outta luck. Throw the phone into the dirtiest junkyard you can find and get yourself a decent phone .
- > Double click on “bluetooth dial up networking “. it will install modem and configure your PC and do all the shit you’d generally have to do manually in linux. Thank god that you dont use linux
- > when you are dont a dial up dialog box will come , hit dial dial and BOOM ! here comes an error message . WTF you ask ? well we haven’t put those “extra initialization command yet ” , so the APN name is not configured yet . Dont lose your mind , we’re gonna put in next few step .
- > Go to control panel > Phone and modem options. if you’re opening it for first time it will ask you to put your country and local phone code . give it and click ok .
- > Now again go to control panel > Phone and modem options . this time it will take a while to open and a window will come . Switch to the “Modems” tab and highlight the “Bluetooth Modem” item in the list. Click “Properties” to open up a settings box. In here, click the “Advanced” tab to find a box where you can enter “Extra initialization commands.” enter +CGDCONT=1, “IP”,”www.airtelgprs.com”
- > Thats it you’re done . Now go to Control Panel > Network Connections and Double click on the icon for your new modem .it will again come with the dial up dialog . click dial and voila ! you’re done . Now open your browser and try by connecting any site .
so basically you can configure with any service provider with these step for example , bsnl use “bsnlnet” as access point so extra initialization command for bsnl would be : +CGDCONT=1, “IP”,”bsnlnet” etc . if you have any questions or this method dont work please put in comment and i’ll try to answer .
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HiThis is a placeholder for my next blog entry, in which i’ll try to bust the myth about megapixel.
i am currently working on it , and hopefully it will be completed by this weekend , so come back then.
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Namaskar !
Namaste Everyone.
Just in case you didn’t know , Namaste is a Hindi word that is roughly equivalant to ‘hello’. it is just a little more polite and have a sense of dignity. its like taking a ‘bow’ ( in japanese context ).
Like the thousand other wordpress blog , this is just another technology blog. Here i will try to write about technology that people everyday use. What i actually want to do is explain technology that everyone uses everyday , in as simplest way as possible and with least technical mumbo-jumbo .
so here i am , enough with this useless blog entry( still you leaned a little about namaste ,didn’t you? ).
Hope to see you again ! Soon.
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